The first time anyone ever suggested my dad wasn't my dad, I was in middle school.

A group of kids had noticed something I apparently never had: my mom was blonde, my dad was a pale white man, and both of them had blue eyes — while I was tan, brown-eyed, and dark-haired. "Your dad probably isn't your dad," they said, half-joking. Looking back, I think they were probably serious.

It stayed in my head. But I always had an explanation. I looked like my mom's side of the family, and both of my maternal grandparents had brown hair, so a dominant brown-hair gene seemed like a perfectly good story. Later, a great-uncle's genealogy research turned up African American ancestry in the family, which explained why I tanned so easily — and planted the curiosity that eventually made me willing to take a DNA test. Case closed, for about thirty years.

Shortly before Christmas of 2024, I was shopping for gifts and saw an ad for Ancestry DNA kits. On a whim, I bought two — one for my wife, one for me. Christmas morning, my wife took one look and said, "Oh hell no!" She didn't do hers. I spit in the tube and mailed it in.

While I waited, I built out a beautiful family tree from everything I knew. The picture was exactly what I'd always believed: ancestors migrating from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Sweden, England, and Germany.

When the results came in, my wife and I looked together, parked outside our oldest daughter's dance class. First the traits — we laughed at the hits and misses. Then the ethnicities. Expecting Welsh, Irish, and Scottish, I saw Mexican, Spanish, and Jewish instead.

My first thought was that they'd mixed up my sample. So I went to the DNA matches looking for all my Welsh, Irish, and Scottish relatives.

Flores. Vasquez. Huizar. Chavez.

Who are these people? These can't be my results. Then it dawned on me: I could prove the results were mine. I dug through distant cousins until I found one I could trace to my mother's side of the family. These were my results.

Which meant my dad was not my dad.

Our daughters found out that day. As we talked about it, both of them yelled "Quince!" — already planning to celebrate their fifteenth birthdays with their newfound Mexicanness.

I didn't want to talk to my parents until I understood what was going on, so I set out to find my biological father. I taught myself centimorgans and relatedness percentages, worked through match after match, and narrowed it down to three candidates — then found the third named in an obituary. I messaged an aunt and uncle on Facebook, asking if they knew how I could reach their brother.

My uncle responded: his brother — my father — had died a year and a half earlier.

That was devastating. I'd spent all this time hunting for my father, and the moment I found him, he was already gone. No conversation. No answers to the questions I was only beginning to know I had. No chance to see myself in his face.

But his family was still here, and they wanted to meet me. After some photos convinced them it wasn't a scam, I was on a plane from Seattle to Sacramento a week later to meet six generations of my newly found family. My cousin's first words to me: "You're shorter than I thought." Then we noticed we were wearing the same black Nike Cortezes. We hugged, and it was surreal. That trip — pizza, bowling, a blur of aunts, uncles, and cousins — was one of the best weeks of my life.

After the trip, I told my mom. She admitted there had been another man, and she remembered his name. I told the man who raised me too. He said he'd always held out hope I was his. But they both knew there was a good chance I wasn't — I was so dark, and it only got more obvious with age. I call it willful ignorance: on both sides, a truth nobody wanted to say out loud for forty years.

How did it feel? All the feelings, all the time, in waves. The ethnicity was validating — my wife had sworn I looked biracial since the day we met. I felt a new appreciation for the man who raised me, alongside anger that the truth had been kept from me for so long. An unresolvable sadness that I'll never meet my biological father. And a strange gratitude that things unfolded the way they did.

Why I started Biofam

I found my family because of a whim while Christmas shopping. Think about that. The most important truth of my life — who I am, where I come from, a family of hundreds of people — reached me by chance, at 41, a year and a half too late to meet my father.

Nobody should have to depend on chance to learn the truth about their own family. And nobody should have to receive that truth alone, unprepared, in a parked car or a late-night inbox, with nowhere to turn next.

What if the front door existed? Honest awareness that reaches people before the crisis. Testing pathways with support built in from the start. And a warm handoff — a real person, not a links page — to counseling, search help, and community for everyone who discovers something.

That's what I'm building Biofam to be.